Henry D. Thoreau 27

Henry D. Thoreau 27

"NEW YORK, _March 16, 1853_.

 

"DEAR SIR,--I have yours of the 9th, inclosing Putnam's

check for $59, making $79 in all you have paid me. I am

paid in full, and this letter is your receipt in full. I

don't want any pay for my 'services,' whatever they may

have been. Consider me your friend who _wished_ to serve

you, however unsuccessfully. Don't break with C. or Putnam."

 

A year later, Thoreau renewed his subscription to the "Weekly

Tribune," but the letter miscarried. In due time came this reply to a

third letter:--

 

"_March 6, 1854._

 

"DEAR SIR,--I presume your first letter containing the $2

was robbed by our general mail robber of New Haven, who has

just been sent to the State's Prison. Your second letter

has probably failed to receive attention owing to a press

of business. But I will make all right. You ought to have

the Semi-weekly, and I shall order it sent to you one year

on trial; if you choose to write me a letter or so some

time, very well; if not, we will be even without that.

 

"Thoreau, I want you to do something on _my_ urgency. I

want you to collect and arrange your 'Miscellanies' and

send them to me. Put in 'Ktaadn,' 'Carlyle,' 'A Winter

Walk,' 'Canada,' etc., and I will try to find a publisher

who will bring them out at his own risk, and (I hope) to

your ultimate profit. If you have anything new to put

with them, very well; but let me have about a 12mo volume

whenever you can get it ready, and see if there is not

something to your credit in the bank of Fortune. Yours,

 

"HORACE GREELEY."

 

In reply, Thoreau notified his friend of the early publication of

"Walden," and was thus met:--

 

"_March 23, 1854._

 

"DEAR THOREAU,--I am glad your 'Walden' is coming out.

_I_ shall announce it at once, whether Ticknor does or

not. I am in no hurry now about your 'Miscellanies;' take

your time, select your title, and prepare your articles

deliberately and finally. Then, if Ticknor will give

you something worth having, let him have this too; if

proffering it to him is to glut your market, let it come to

me. But take your time. I was only thinking you were merely

waiting when you might be doing something. I referred

(without naming you) to your 'Walden' experience in my

lecture on 'Self-Culture,' with which I have had ever so

many audiences. This episode excited much interest, and I

have been repeatedly asked who it is that I refer to.

 

"Yours,

 

"HORACE GREELEY.

 

"P. S.--You must know Miss Elizabeth Hoar, whereas I

hardly do. Now, I have offered to edit Margaret's works,

and I want of Elizabeth a letter or memorandum of personal

recollections of Margaret and her ideas. Can't you ask her

to write it for me?

 

"H. G."

 

To the request of this postscript Thoreau attended at once, but the

"Miscellanies" dwelt not in his mind, it would seem. He had now

become deeply concerned about slavery, was also pursuing his studies

concerning the Indians, and had little time for the collection of his

published papers. A short note of April 2, 1854, closes this part of

the Greeley correspondence, thus:--

 

"DEAR THOREAU,--Thank you for your kindness in the matter

of Margaret. Pray take no further trouble; but if anything

should come in your way, calculated to help me, do not

forget.

 

"Yours,

 

"HORACE GREELEY."

 

In August, 1855, Mr. Greeley wrote to suggest that copies of "Walden"

should be sent to the "Westminster Review," to "The Reasoner,"

147 Fleet Street, London, to Gerald Massey, office of the "News,"

Edinburgh, and to "---- Wills, Esq., Dickens's Household Words,"

adding:--

 

"There is a small class in England who ought to know what

you have written, and I feel sure your publishers would not

throw away copies sent to these periodicals; especially

if your 'Week on the Concord and Merrimac' could accompany

them. Chapman, editor of the 'Westminster,' expressed

surprise that your book had not been sent him, and I could

find very few who had read or seen it. If a new edition

should be called for, try to have it better known in

Europe, but have a few copies sent to those worthy of it,

at all events."

 

In March, 1856, Mr. Greeley opened a new correspondence with Thoreau,

asking him to become the tutor of his children, and to live with

him, or near him, at Chappaqua. The proposition was made in the most

generous manner, and was for a time considered by Thoreau, who felt a

sense of obligation as well as a sincere friendship towards the man

who had believed in him and served him so seasonably in the years of

his obscurity. But it resulted in nothing further than a brief visit

to Mr. Greeley in the following autumn, during which, as Thoreau used

to say, Mr. Alcott and Mr. Greeley went to the opera together.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER X.

 

IN WOOD AND FIELD.

 

 

Except the Indians themselves, whose wood-craft he never tires of

celebrating, few Americans were ever more at home in the open air than

Thoreau; not even his friend John Brown, who, like himself, suggested

the Indian by the delicacy of his perceptions and his familiarity with

all that goes forward, or stands still, in wood and field. Thoreau

could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet

than his eyes.

 

"He was a good swimmer," says Emerson, "a good runner,

skater, boatman, and would outwalk most countrymen in a

day's journey. And the relation of body to mind was still

finer. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of

his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at

all."

 

In his last illness says Channing,--

 

"His habit of engrossing his thoughts in a journal, which

had lasted for a quarter of a century,--his out-door life,

of which he used to say, if he omitted that, all his living

ceased,--this now became so incontrovertibly a thing of the

past that he said once, standing at the window, 'I cannot

see on the outside at all. We thought ourselves great

philosophers in those wet days when we used to go out and

sit down by the wall-sides.' This was absolutely all he was

ever heard to say of that outward world during his illness,

neither could a stranger in the least infer that he had

ever a friend in field or wood."

 

This out-door life began as early as he could recollect, and his

special attraction to rivers, woods, and lakes was a thing of his

boyhood. He had begun to collect Indian relics before leaving college,

and was a diligent student of natural history there. Whether he was

naturally an observer or not (which has been denied in a kind of

malicious paradox), let his life-work attest. Early in 1847 he made

some collections of fishes, turtles, etc., in Concord for Agassiz,

then newly arrived in America, and I have (in a letter of May 3, 1847)

this account of their reception:--

 

"I carried them immediately to Mr. Agassiz, who was

highly delighted with them. Some of the species he had

seen before, but never in so fresh condition. Others, as

the breams and the pout, he had seen only in spirits, and

the little turtle he knew only from the books. I am sure

you would have felt fully repaid for your trouble, if

you could have seen the eager satisfaction with which he

surveyed each fin and scale. He said the small mud-turtle

was really a very rare species, quite distinct from the

snapping-turtle. The breams and pout seemed to please the

Professor very much. He would gladly come up to Concord to

make a spearing excursion, as you suggested, but is drawn

off by numerous and pressing engagements."

 

On the 27th of May, Thoreau's correspondent says:--

 

"Mr. Agassiz was very much surprised and pleased at the

extent of the collections you sent during his absence; the

little fox he has established in comfortable quarters in

his backyard, where he is doing well. Among the fishes you

sent there is one, probably two, new species."

 

June 1st, in other collections, other new species were discovered,

much to Agassiz's delight, who never failed afterward to cultivate

Thoreau's society when he could. But the poet avoided the man of

science, having no love for dissection; though he recognized in

Agassiz the qualities that gave him so much distinction.

 

The paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which Horace Greeley

bought "at a Jew's bargain," and sold to a publisher for seventy-five

dollars, was the journal of a visit made to the highest mountain of

Maine during Thoreau's second summer at Walden. An aunt of his had

married in Bangor, Maine, and her daughters had again married there,

so that the young forester of Concord had kinsmen on the Penobscot,

engaged in converting the Maine forests into pine lumber. At the end

of August, in 1846, while his Carlyle manuscript was passing from

Greeley to Griswold, from Griswold to Graham, and from Graham to

the Philadelphia type-setters, Thoreau himself was on his way from

Boston to Bangor; and on the first day of September he started with

his cousin from Bangor, to explore the upper waters of the Penobscot

and climb the summit of Ktaadn. The forest region about this mountain

had been explored in 1837 by Dr. Jackson, the State Geologist, a

brother-in-law of Mr. Emerson; but no poet before Thoreau had visited

these solitudes and described his experiences there. James Russell

Lowell did so a few years later, and, early in the century, Hawthorne,

Longfellow, and Emerson had tested the solitude of the Maine woods,

and written about them. The verses of Emerson, describing his own

experiences there (not so well known as they should be), are often

thought to imply Thoreau, though they were written before Emerson had

known his younger friend, whose after adventures they portray with felicity.